Design Focus: Type Sites

It’s that time again for a roundup of smartly-designed sites you should look to for inspiration. And this week it’s all about sites dedicated to typefaces you can buy and download. See how they peddle these digital goodies to customers.

Designs of the Week

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Dolce Caffè Font

It’s easy to make the connection between the name of the font and the design concept at work here: aside from the compartmentalized/bento arrangement, it’s also the colorful scheme and the chalkboard signs that remind you of those cozy cafes with handwritten menus. Practically every box has a simple animation looping back and forth, but nothing too distracting and adds to the kitsch.

Typo Popote

Another cafe/restaurant-themed design that’s all warm and welcoming. I like the subtle icons on both sidebars and the embossed treatment on it and the text. The plaid background pattern also reinforces the look, not to mention the choice of fonts and colors.

Cirulis Typeface

There’s a nice little exploding effect as you scroll down, which is a great idea for font sites if you ask me. Even smarter is how texts appear once you arrive at that section of the page, making sure you’re on the right track about what you should be looking at. Simple, solid, effective.

Social Media Weekly

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Programming – You Have To Get Good Before You Get Better
“There are three things to bear in mind when you look at the process of acquiring skill: how you think your rate of progress will look at the beginning, how your rate of progress actually is day-to-day and how you think your rate of progress is day-to-day. Let’s look at some charts to get a better picture of what I’m talking about.”

CSS – SASS vs. LESS
“Slightly longer answer: SASS is better on a whole bunch of different fronts, but if you are already happy in LESS, that’s cool, at least you are doing yourself a favor by preprocessing.”

Mobile Web Design – Your local mobile device lab
“This is great! Just by opening up the testing suite to everyone, it has now expanded beyond what I had been able to gather together by myself.”

Web Standards – Cutting the mustard
“One of the immediate challenges we discovered when we first started the responsive news prototype was the large range of devices that we would have to support. It terrified us. This article is about a solution we use to alleviate this problem.”